In The Axe” a literature professor arrives at the door of one of his students in the middle of the night. On his way he has stumbled (with a flask of whiskey) through the pouring rain, stopping in a city park to vandalize the statue of an angel, tormented by the image of his life’s work, ninety-seven poems he has left behind in flames in his apartment. The student has turned in an assignment (which the professor has brought along in his briefcase): a carefully wrapped hatchet.In Piercing” a teenage runaway, Marie-He´lene, seeks to escape the mediocrity of her small-town family life, only to end up in a very different kind of urban family,” a cult of dominance and body piercing presided over by Kevin, the maimed and orphaned son of a millionaire. They live in a church converted into luxury condos, with a strange ageless and toothless woman who plays guardian to him and his test-tube son Raphael: a 20 year old computer nerd working on an MA thesis on securitization.In Anna on the Letter C” a lonely, virginal typist transcribing the c” words for a dictionary project lives just blocks away from the church where Rasputin-like Kevin holds court. But her world is not inhabited by the angels and demons of Piercing.”Taking pity on a middle-aged stalker (a seedy, sweating chain-smoker, retired from his job as a projectionist in soft-core porn cinemas), she invites him to her apartment for tea. As they sit, awkwardly making conversation, she confesses that she is a virgin. Her feelings for him waver between repulsion and compassion. His desire for her is palpable as heat lightning flashes in the summer night.

Piercing

Literature & Fiction

Tremblay, Larry

Dramas & Plays

Talonbooks

John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. Inside that theater today, Ranger Powell of the U.S. Parks Service takes crowds of tourists, the curious and the ghoulish through a step-by-step description of the assassination. Underneath the box where Lincoln was shot, he describes the plot of the comedy Lincoln watched that night, Our American Cousin, as being kind of like the Beverly Hillbillies.”Scratch the surface of any story and underneath you will find layer upon layer of fiction masquerading as fact. The play’s main character, Mark Killmana feared but much admired directordraws inspiration from Abraham Lincoln’s assassination to stage the schizophrenia of America. He hires two actors to play Laurel and Hardy. Both are to re-enact the assassination, while he himself plays the iconic role of Abraham Lincoln as a wax figure.The script is frequently self-referential, building on each of these retakes” with further allusions to itself, telling the same story many times over in different voices from different points of view. Tremblay quite explicitly stages elements of literary theory with this play, including references to Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacra and the desert of the real,” concepts first popularized by the movie The Matrixthe idea that in our post-modern world, the imitator has become more relevant than the imitated, and that the virtual worlds we construct are becoming more real” to us than the real world.Absurd, hilarious and haunting, Abraham Lincoln Goes to the Theatre is an unforgettable mystery that asks the question: How can we ever know who we are and what is true when the world we know is shifting beneath us? Its answer is simple: John Wilkes Booth was the first American starthe actor who kidnapped reality to transform it into theater.Cast of 3 men.

Abraham Lincoln Goes to the Theatre

The asocial, sexually repressed Edgar, kneeling in grief at his mother’s graveside, turns abruptly to witness a terrifying and life-altering event: the brutal rape of a young woman. Compelled by muddled instinct (and ingrained religious conviction), our hero bears the unconscious victim home, solemnly pledging to care for her  and to act as her saviour. As winter closes in, the captor’s neuroses are revealed and his behaviour becomes increasingly violent, allowing the victim only one escape.With The Obese Christ, Larry Tremblay squarely situates himself within the realm of Hitchcock, Polanski, and Stephen King. A brilliant exercise in unease and paranoia, The Obese Christ demonstrates Tremblay’s powerful ability to evoke dead and fear, while immersing the reader in a wrapped and putrid world told from Edgar’s sanctified point of view.

The Obese Christ e-book

Literary

Twin brothers Amed and Aziz live in the peaceful shade of their family’s orange grove. But when a bomb kills the boys’ grandparents, the war that plagues their country changes their lives forever. Blood must repay blood, and, in order to avenge their grandparents’ deaths, one brother must offer the ultimate sacrifice. Years later, the surviving twin now a student actor in a wintry Montreal is given a role which forces him to confront the past. Tremblay, an actor and director himself, poses the difficult question: can art ever adequately address suffering? Both current and timeless, written with the sharp purity of desert poetry, The Orange Grove depicts the haunting inheritance of war and its aftermath.

The Orange Grove: A Novel

MILKWEED EDITIONS *

War takes no prisoners. It involves everyone - even children.Twin brothers, Amed and Aziz, live in the peaceful shade of their family's orange grove. But when a bomb kills the boys' grandparents, they become pawns in their country's civil war. Blood demands more blood and, at the command of a local militant group, either Ahmed or Aziz must strap on a belt of explosives and make the ultimate sacrifice. Years later, the surviving twin works as an actor in wintry Montreal. A theatre director gives him a role that forces the young man to reconsider his decisions. Will Ahmed - or is it Aziz? - release himself from the past?

The Orange Grove

Genre Fiction

Biblioasis

A playful and macabre narrative tour de force, structured like a matryoshka doll, Impurity weaves a complex web of interlocking narratives in multiple voices and a variety of forms. The bestselling author Alice Livingston is dead, leaving her philosopher husband, Antoine, dealing with a legacy towards which he has felt increasingly estranged. Confronted with his wife's much reported disappearance, Antoine revisits their past relationship: open and liberated on the outside, but constrained and even deviant on the inside. The news of the day (the death of JFK Junior, the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk, etc.) announced by the television running in the novel's background gradually becomes significant in the lives of the protagonists - as revealed in Alice's last book. As narrators of the novel become less and less reliable, good intentions become corrupted, appearances prove to be deceiving, and Impurity's multiple plots come to a gripping, asphyxiating conclusion.

Impurity

Peirene Press

Gallimard]

L'Orangeraie

Contemporary

TABLE RONDE

THE DRAGONFLY OF CHICOUTIMI

HERBES ROUGES

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Tremblay, Larry. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Tremblay, Larry

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Tremblay, Larry. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Piercing

Abraham Lincoln Goes to the Theatre

The Obese Christ e-book

The Orange Grove: A Novel

The Orange Grove

Impurity

The Orange Grove

Piercing

L'Orangeraie

THE DRAGONFLY OF CHICOUTIMI